Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

The recent Pirate Bay case was so significant that the verdict made it onto the mainstream news, and it has been interesting talking to people who are not computer experts about their feelings on the matter. There are two options that seem to be presented by people on the different sides of the debate: either all musicians and film makers go out of business because infringement is unstoppable, or the whole Internet has to be shut down because all online services are illegal. Although rather extreme views, I think this dichotomy reflects the very difficult decision that the court had to make, and looking at the verdict, I think that in particular the judge walked a very narrow line. I have heard some very weird arguments such as “The site had the word ‘pirate’ in the name, therefore they must be guilty as accomplices to copyright infringement” but fortunately the case does not seem to have hinged on this. From my layperson’s perspective, though, the verdict did seem to involve some surprising legal reasoning, and I would like to present to you some points from it which could form the basis of an appeal, as well as some points where the law might unintuitively agree with the prosecution.

While looking through my ideas for potential future blog posts, I came across some notes I made while trying to consolidate my understanding of closures in Groovy. I also had a few points I wanted to make about other aspects of the language, including things I found while working on the game that I presented in my last blog post, so I thought that this would be a good time to write up these ideas. This post may end up sounding like a criticism of Groovy’s documentation and tool support, but it is a fairly new language and I think that should be taken into account. The small problems I have come across have certainly not put me off it, but have perhaps given me a greater appreciation of more mature languages like PHP.